Introduction

What are the uses of literature—or film, sculpture, dance, philosophy, music, dramatic performance? And to what purpose are these subjects being taught in colleges and universities? At present, such questions are very much in the air, thanks to a heated back-and-forth about the value of humanistic study. Bristling with a new-found sense of indignation, politicians and pundits are demanding that the humanities be called to account, that professors be required to document the uses of the subjects they teach. There is no longer any agreement, it would seem, that Baudelaire and Buddhism are worth studying for their own sake. To many scholars, such demands seem radically misconceived—a sign of the growing philistinism and creeping corporatization of academic life. Yet in certain cases, interlocutors may be talking at cross-purposes. After all, what exactly do we mean when we talk about use? What does “use” encompass and how might its meanings and possibilities be understood? The essays in this special issue share a sharpened curiosity about a constantly invoked yet rarely examined idea.

Use: the very word is stubby, plain, workmanlike, its monosyllabic bluntness as bare and unadorned as the thing that it names. It radiates overtones of sturdy practicality, bringing to mind images of shapeless overalls and sensible shoes. We tend to equate the useful with what is plodding, rational, and charmless, to oppose the useful to the dance of the imagination, the play of fantasy, the rhythms and roilings of desire. The language of use calls us back to nonnegotiable needs of human existence, while steering us away from the siren song of the impractical or incalculable. And its various cognates quickly slide into the bland boilerplate of bureaucrats and technocrats: functional, instrumental, utilitarian, efficient, serviceable, profitable, strategic.

The relentless encroachment of such language into every cranny of contemporary life seems unstoppable, lending itself to a familiar cultural-pessimist critique—the lament that imagination and invention have been banished from the world by a soulless regime of efficiency, logic, and profit. Usefulness, in this line of thought, is the quintessential bourgeois virtue, epitomized in a Gradgrindian eagerness to weigh and measure every last part of human existence. Brushing away everything that cannot be calculated and quantified, the modern worship of utility results in a disenchanted world in which human beings are stripped down to their base functions as workers and consumers and nature itself becomes a mere tool of human desires. This is the world of what the Frankfurt School called instrumental rationality: the tyranny of use elevated to the supreme principle of modern social life. It is not surprising then, that T. W. Adorno hails the uselessness of the artwork as its redeeming feature: the mark of its stubborn resistance to the means-end thinking of a degraded modernity. The purposelessness of art defies the ubiquitous demand to be useful; the very refusal of function serves an emancipatory social function.

Here Adorno is giving a Marxist twist to a tradition of aesthetic theory that has often conceived of art in terms of autonomy, disinterestedness, or separation from social life. There are many artists and critics, of course, who forcefully repudiate such a view. But a significant strand of modern thought—from Wilde’s “All art is quite useless” to Auden’s “poetry makes nothing happen”—has sought to guard art’s distance from the push and pull of immediate needs and practical interests. A similar wariness about use and utility persists in contemporary criticism, motivated by the fear that such language implies a subordination of poetic means to extraneous ends. For every critic who seeks to calibrate literature in terms of its political use value, there is another critic who strenuously resists the resort to such measurement. To use, it is argued, is to objectify, reify, reduce, appropriate, consume, or “use up.” The language of utility is reductive and thus destructive, laying waste to the specialness and singularity of the artwork. From aestheticism and New Criticism to deconstruction and the new ethics of reading, literary critics have often railed against the very idea of usefulness.

And yet, we might ask, is use always instrumental? Is the practical...